


Ring and Rope

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-13
Updated: 2004-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:09:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Eddie and Susannah fall in love all over again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ring and Rope

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Aspen

 

 

Ring and Rope

In the weeks following their confrontation with the Tick-Tock Man and the man - who had not really been a man at all - called Flagg in the great chamber of the Green Palace, the going had been steady but dull. These were the times Kerouac never talked about, Eddie Dean thought: the long, listless journeying in between grand adventures. The landscape had been little more than scrub plain, a few hoary trees clutching up out of the barren earth like the futile, grasping hands of a drowning man. As far as Eddie could see, change was not on the immediate horizon.

But Eddie could not see as well as Roland of Gilead.

"See there," Roland said one morning as they packed up camp after a light breakfast of gunslinger burritos and Keebler cookies. Eddie squinted toward whatever Roland was pointing at, but could make out nothing but more barren plain.

"Not really," Eddie said, craning his neck forward. God, Roland's eyes were sharp!

"It's a tree," Roland explained. "Not a mutie, like those we've seen. Ironwood, perhaps, and growing strong."

"But Roland," Susannah countered from his other side. She was also squinting. "This earth's pretty much dead. How can anything grow out of this?"

"How can a green castle made of glass simply appear in the middle of the road?" Roland said. When Susannah looked up at him, she saw he was wearing that slight smile that was becoming more and more familiar on his face.

"Point taken," she said, then went back to lacing her pack up. Eddie hesitated for a moment, turning back to Roland.

"Does it mean anything?" he asked, his voice low so that Jake - sternly covering the campfire with mounds of dead earth - wouldn't hear.

"Not everything holds a greater meaning, Eddie," Roland replied. Then he cocked an eyebrow and said, "Could be a coincidence."

"Coincidence has been cancelled," Eddie mumbled.

"If we press on, we can make it there tonight," Roland said. Eddie nodded, then bent down to Susannah.

"You up for getting there tonight?" he asked, lifting her in his arms and holding her close to him. Sometimes, the very smell of her - sweet and light, like a memory of a good dream - was almost too much to handle.

"Sugar," she said, "if it changes the landscape, I'm up for almost anything."

"Careful what you wish for," he said, then kissed her, and kissed her well.

* * *

Roland's prediction had been correct: beneath the slowly rising face of the Peddler's Moon, Roland and the Ka-tet of Nineteen arrived at the tree.

"Willowgreen, not ironwood." Roland reached up to touch one of the branches, as if confirming the trees existence. "Light as foam," he said, "but strong."

"Why is it here?" Jake asked.

" 'ere!" Oy barked from the ground by Jake's feet, eerily mirroring Jake's inquisitive tone.

"I don't know," Roland said. "Mayhap it's one of those things that truly holds no greater meaning."

"But growing?" Susannah asked. "And firm and strong, no less?" Roland shrugged in that maddening way he had when he considered the subject closed. It didn't matter to him, so it didn't matter. She turned to Eddie, who was gazing at the tree, his head cocked and his eyes seemingly mesmerized by the fact of it. She'd seen that look in his eyes before, though right now, she couldn't place it.

"What do you think, shug?" she asked her husband, her voice soft.

"I think ...," Eddie began, squinting even more at the branch Roland had so casually touched. There was something in there, some shape. Not a key, not that again ... but he suspected that it was almost as important. A shape he could coax out of the wood with Roland's knife, if he had the courage to do so. "I think coincidence has been canceled, Suze," he said, then turned to her and smiled.

"You think there's a reason for the tree, then?" she asked.

"Suze," he said, "in Mid-World, there's a reason for everything."

* * *

She woke with a start just before dawn. She'd been having a dream about strolling (strolling! imagine that!) through some great banquet hall and feasting on whatever sumptuous delights that had been laid out for her. The dream was muddled and indistinct, but something about it scared her, filling her with a sense of foreboding. *Coincidence has been canceled*, Eddie kept saying, and maybe this dream of hers meant something. Probably not ... but maybe. When she awoke, she found that her hand had gone to her belly, as if protecting whatever was growing inside it.

*You should tell him about the baby*, she thought in those first fleeting seconds of muddy clarity. *You should tell*...

And there he was, her man, sitting up and wide awake by the guttering embers of the campfire. The night was still around them, and the others asleep. She blinked once, twice, and saw with both bemusement and concern that he was whittling.

"Shug," she whispered, and now it was *his* turn to start, gasping and looking around wildly.

"Suze," he said, "*damn*, you spooked me."

"Sorry. Couldn't sleep." She nodded at him. "You too?"

"Something like that," he said, looking at whatever he was carving in his lap. The blade of Roland's knife caught flickers from the campfire and threw the light into the rapidly shrinking darkness. "I've been up all night."

"What you got there?" she asked. "What you be carving?"

"No Detta," he said kindly. "Not right now, okay?"

Susannah blinked. Had she been talking like Detta? Was it really so easy to lapse back into the patois - the *personality *- she had so successfully shed? *You better watch that, girl*, she thought. *If Detta can slip in that easily, there's no telling who *else* might be out there in the darkness*.

"Sorry, Eddie," she said, then poked a stick into the campfire and stirred it.

" 's ok," he said, looking back down at his work and frowning. Then, abruptly, he asked, "I don't talk about ... well, about my heroin days much, do I?"

"Not really," she said, trying to sound casual. If she pressed him, Eddie might clam up. He'd done it before.

"When I hadn't had it in awhile, it was all I could think about, you know? How to score some. How quickly I could get it. How much I'd have to share with Henry." Susannah nodded. When Eddie talked about his brother, it was best not to interrupt. "Then out here, when I got clean ... I didn't have to feel that way anymore. None of that itching that comes with the physical need for it. None of that, you know, *brain*-itching that's the dependence. All of the bad shit that came with addiction, Suze, that all went away. I guess I owe that to long, tall and ugly over there." He gave the slightest of nods to Roland, still curled up under his blankets, his eyes tightly closed.

"But I was kinda wrong," he said. "I thought out here that I could never need anything that badly again. Not emotionally, not physically. Giving up heroin - however unwillingly - was the best thing I ever did, and in Roland's world, I was pretty sure I would never have that kind of ... well, addiction again. But I was wrong."

"Your whittling," Susannah said, smiling at him. He smiled back.

"No, you dope," he said. "*You*."

He held out what he'd been carving, and in the failing firelight she saw what it was: a ring.

"Eddie?" she asked, her hand going to her chest and her eyes going wide. "Eddie, what...?"

He moved over to her side of the campfire, touched her shoulders, and kissed her gently. "Susannah, I need you like I need water. Meeting you ... I don't think we're coincidence, either. If I'd met you on some other world in some other situation, I think I'd still love you more than life itself. I need you and I want you, and I just hope that you can feel half as much for a dumb kid from New York like me."

"Twice as much, Eddie," she said. "Twice as much."

She looked at him, deep into those green

(*willowgreen *)

eyes and fell in love with him all over again. She looked deep into him and felt him looking into her, feeling the same, loving the same. From his pocket, he brought the thin rawhide rope he must have cut from the straps of his haversack earlier that night, when she'd been dreaming. He laced it through the willowgreen ring and tied the ends off.

"Susannah Dean," he said, not taking his eyes from her. "Will you marry me?"

She felt tears spring to her eyes and made no attempt to blink them away. "Eddie Dean," she said, "yes I will."

He slipped the rawhide necklace over her head. The willowgreen ring lay against her skin, light brown on dark brown, looking as if it had been there for long and long.

"I love you, Susannah," Eddie said.

"And I you, Eddie," she replied, and in the last hopeful minutes of the quickening night, they made love by the fading embers. As the Peddler's Moon retreated and daylight broke above, Eddie and Susannah Dean fell into dreamless sleep, wrapped in each other's arms.

 

 

 


End file.
